Poets

Paisley Rekdal

Paisley Rekdal was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. She received an MA from the University of Toronto and an MFA from the University of Michigan.

Rekdal is the author of Nightingale, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2019; Imaginary Vessels (Copper Canyon Press, 2016); Animal Eye (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), winner of the 2013 Rilke Prize from the University of North Texas; The Invention of the Kaleidoscope (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007); Six Girls without Pants (Eastern Washington University, 2002); and A Crash of Rhinos (University of Georgia Press, 2000), winner of the University of Georgia Press’ Contemporary Poetry Series Award.

The poet Major Jackson writes, “With all of their rhetorical pleasures and illustrative rhythms, Rekdal’s poems are deeply marked by a sensate, near terrestrial, relationship to language such that she refreshes and renews debates about beauty, suffering, and art for the twenty-first century reader.”

Rekdal is also the author of a book-length essay, The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam (University of Georgia Press, 2017); an essay collection, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee (Pantheon Books, 2000); and a hybrid-genre memoir, Intimate (Tupelo Press, 2012).

She is the recipient of fellowships from the Amy Lowell Trust, Civitella Ranieri, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. In May 2017, Rekdal was named poet laureate of Utah. In 2019, she was named an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. She currently teaches at the University of Utah and lives in Salt Lake City.

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By This Poet

unveil themselves in dark.
They hang, each a jagged,
silken sleeve, from moonlit rafters bright
as polished knives. They swim
the muddled air and keen
like supersonic babies, the sound
we imagine empty wombs might make
in women who can’t fill them up.
A clasp, a scratch, a sigh.
They drink fruit dry.
And wheel, against feverish light flung hard
upon their faces,
in circles that nauseate.
Imagine one at breast or neck,
Patterning a name in driblets of iodine
that spatter your skin stars.
They flutter, shake like mystics.
They materialize. Revelatory
as a stranger’s underthings found tossed
upon the marital bed, you tremble
even at the thought. Asleep,
you tear your fingers
and search the sheets all night.

How horrible it is, how horrible
that Cronenberg film where Goldblum's trapped
with a fly inside his Material
Transformer: bits of the man emerging
gooey, many-eyed; bits of the fly
worrying that his agent's screwed him–
I almost flinch to see the body later
that's left its fly in the corner, I mean
the fly that's left its body, recalling too
that medieval nightmare, Resurrection,
in which each soul must scurry
to rejoin the plush interiors of its flesh,
pushing through, marrying indiscriminately
because Heaven won't take what's only half:
one soul blurring forever
into another body.
If we can't know the boundaries between ourselves
in life, what will they be in death,
corrupted steadily by maggot,
rain or superstition, by affection
that depends on memory to survive?
People should keep their hands to themselves
for the remainder of the flight: who needs
some stranger's waistline, joint
problems or insecurities? Darling,
what I love in you I pray will always stay
the hell away from me.